[Here we are, once again, commemorating the event that has been used to justify “the war that won’t end in our lifetime.” The mainstream press and the U.S. Government have intensified their propaganda campaigns against the truth of 9/11 just in time for the occasion. The latest campaign came just a few weeks ago published by the U.S. Bureau of International Information where they list “The Top September 11 Conspiracy Theories.” The overwhelming majority of the “theories” that are posted deal with physical evidence while avoiding the central issues and documentation that are at the core of the case laid out in “Crossing the Rubicon” by Michael Ruppert. His case is ignored because it hasn’t been (and can’t be) contested in its totality.

We should all take note as to what is being focused on compared with what is being ignored or silenced. In doing so, perhaps we will learn how to fight the battles that lie ahead of us more effectively. – MK]

September 11th 2006, 1:49PM [PST] -During the past five years, as an adjunct professor of history, I have frequently required students to do an intensive research project on 9-11. On the front page of the handout of instructions provided is the above photo—two of New York’s finest from the former Emmy-award-winning television show, NYPD Blue. I chose this photo for its background (the Twin Towers) and the title of my handout which is: “Be An Information Cop.”

Very few American college students, like very few Americans in general, have a concept of critical thinking—thinking that is analytical, investigative, and dispassionately detached from vapid, emotionally-loaded concepts like “United We Stand” or “These Colors Don’t Run.” Many find it difficult to understand why their history professor would want them to investigate an event that is “so over” and which in their opinion is now “ancient history.” It then becomes necessary to explain to them what 9-11 has to do with current events such as the interminable war in Iraq, loss of civil liberties in America, a tanking economy, their own student loan debt, and the fact that when they leave college, they are not likely to find employment—unless, of course, they want to move to a third-world country and be paid one-fourth of what they would earn in the U.S. One of the most effective ways of helping them connect all the dots is to require them to become information cops and think, analyze, deduce, and evaluate in ways they have never done—and given the milieu into which they will graduate—may never do again.

On this fifth anniversary of the horror that gripped America on September 11, 2001, one thing feels extraordinarily appropriate to me: Acknowledging not only our grief for the innocent victims of that day’s butchery, but our grief for all of the valiant men and women who have sacrificed everything but their lives to illumine the reality of the coup d’etat that took place on that day as the United States government orchestrated the attacks then immediately implemented its pathetic, shabby coverup which non-questioning Americans have accepted ever since. I think of the 9-11 widows, the Jersey Girls, who have spent the past five years relentlessly shouting the evidence, refusing to be silenced. I think of Sibel Edmonds who, still under a gag order by the Justice Department, continues to write and speak all that she is able about the conversations she overheard on international wires before and on that infamous day. The venerable elder statesman and philosopher-sage, David Ray Griffin, whose books, The New Pearl Harbor and The 9-11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions offer his readers impeccable logic, documentation, and analysis. I think of FTW’s beloved Cynthia Mc Kinney who eyeball-to-eyeball, looked at Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and said, “Mr. Chairman, I have a question….and my question in particular is about the four war games that were taking place on September 11th and how they may have impaired our ability to respond to those attacks.” My mind wanders to Barry Zwicker, another friend of FTW, whose documentary “The Great Conspiracy” further illumines the greatest conspiracy theory in the history of the world: the “official” story of 9-11 brought to us by the “9-11 Omission Report”. I reflect on other heroes and “sheroes” of 9-11 skepticism: Indira Singh, Michel Chossudovsky, Nafeez Ahmed, Paul Thompson, and many more.

But of course, on this day, my heart most fondly gravitates to FTW’s founder the now-expatriated, Mike Ruppert, the most courageous and intellectually-fastidious information cop I know. My sorrow is not that others are exploring the physical evidence of the 9-11 attacks, although I know that it carries little weight since it has almost all been destroyed and since the attacks’ designers will always have at their disposal more money and more power to manipulate the evidence than any person or group endeavoring to prove government orchestration from physical evidence. My sorrow is that amid the plethora of inquiries into what actually transpired on and before 9-11, the impeccable legal and military evidence documented by Mike Ruppert in CROSSING THE RUBICON: The Decline Of The American Empire At The End Of The Age Of Oil has been so profoundly ignored. On the other hand, I should perhaps rejoice since the only thing criminals can do with evidence they can neither refute nor manipulate is ignore it.

More than one student has confessed in the middle of his/her research project: “This is too much information. I really don’t want to know who committed the atrocities of 9-11.” In response to my inevitable, “And why is that?” the answer is always the same: “Because if my country committed 9-11, then I don’t have a country.”

I thought of titling this article “43 and 5” because the first number is the years passed since the assassination of John F. Kennedy the first coup d’etat through which I lived when I too was a college student. Apparently, my generation didn’t really want to know either because had it succeeded in finding out, it would have discovered that even then, it didn’t have a country. The final catastrophe and most calamitous casualty of that bright September morning five years ago is even more horrifying than the human carnage because the ultimate fatality was the killing of truth. Perhaps somewhere, sometime history textbooks will teach what actually happened on November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001, but I can only gasp when I ponder the amount of human suffering that will be required before the citizens of this nation can bear to hear it.

On this day, I salute Michael C. Ruppert and the pieces of his body and soul imbedded in RUBICON, the third-largest-selling book on 9-11 behind the “Omission Report.” I have probably given it to over 100 people. Some still tell me they haven’t yet read it because “it’s too dense” or “it’s hard to follow.” Such is the non-analytical American mind whether one is in his mid-twenties or mid-life. Curious how some of the same folks are mesmerized by convoluted technical explanations of how the towers collapsed and how a plane could not have hit the Pentagon. Those who orchestrated the attacks spent countless amounts of money and years designing their crime. To unravel physical evidence but also incorporating the aspects of energy issues, motive, means, opportunity and military and political realities behind 9-11 requires patient investigation, analysis, and wrestling with sometimes mind-numbing minutae. RUBICON is not fluff—a trashy novel to be read at bedtime for its soothing, hypnotic value. It is a ghastly horror story, a nightmarish detective thriller, a cathedral of investigative genius, buttressed by intricate bulwarks of breathtaking discernment. But then why am I trying to evaluate the most brilliant and comprehensive scrutiny of 9-11 in print? The folks at www.amazon.com did it best, but even some enthusiastic fans of Rubicon have not read Amazon’s review which defines Rubicon far more succinctly and poignantly than I could have:

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies key suspects-finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government-by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks produced the desired result.

Crossing the Rubicon is unique not only for its case-breaking examination of 9/11, but for the breadth and depth of its world picture-an interdisciplinary analysis of petroleum, geopolitics, narcotraffic, intelligence and militarism-without which 9/11 cannot be understood.

The US manufacturing sector has been mostly replaced by speculation on financial data whose underlying economic reality is a dark secret. Hundreds of billions of dollars in laundered drug money flow through Wall Street each year from opium and coca fields maintained by CIA-sponsored warlords and US-backed covert paramilitary violence. America's global dominance depends on a continually turning mill of guns, drugs, oil and money. Oil and natural gas-the fuels that make economic growth possible-are subsidized by American military force and foreign lending.

In reality, 9/11 and the resulting "war on terror" are parts of a massive authoritarian response to an emerging economic crisis of unprecedented scale. Peak Oil-the beginning of the end for our industrial civilization-is driving the elites of American power to implement unthinkably draconian measures of repression, warfare and population control. Crossing the Rubicon is more than a story. It is a map of the perilous terrain through which, together and alone, we are all now making our way.